What's your favorite first line?

Thanks for the replies Shout Grace and Mono

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia would remember that distant afternoon when his father first took him to discover ice.

The Turn of the Screw - Henry James

'The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child'

I think the whole first paragraph has to be posted:

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."

Thrills and chills.

But I'll also second the motions for Calvino's If on a winter's night a Traveller, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.

Also, yes, Camus:

« Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas. J'ai reçu un télégramme de l'asile : “Mère décédée. Enterrement demain. Sentiments distingués.” Cela ne veut rien dire. C'était peut-être hier. »

"I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves."

From then on it only gets better.

there are so many first sentences that influence you to read a book, and then there are first sentences that influence yout to read it again. i have many favourites, many of them are deep and hold profound thought, but the one that leaps to mind without really having to think much is:

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

It is this sentence that never fails to intrigue me, and being a concise, to-the-point beginning, and brings about a beautiful realisation of the human physche. I take it as it is, it's snappy, and never fails to capture my fancy.

I have two...

The one in my signature from Pride and Prejudice.

And the opening line in A Tale of Two Cities.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

dulas
"l'amant"
I am old .
one day ,in a public place,a man walked to me .he said to me ,I Know you and always remeber you .you are a young lady in that time,and everybody told that you are so pretty. now I just come to tell you that you appears more beauty in this time , compare to your young face ,I love your old rough face better.

not factly

sorry
the translation is not exact

I LIKE "One Hundred Years of Solitude" SO MUCH
but the first word is not the best
however
the first man who begins with that is the best

I agree with the three postings of Lolita. Nabokov also has a pretty good opening to his biography, Speak Memory: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two extremities of darkness" - a lullaby beginning.

Without a doubt it would have to be Woman in White...

"This is the story of what a Woman's patience can endure, and what a
Man's resolution can achieve."

"Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me."

- The Tin Drum

Bysshe,

For some reason your quote immediately reminded me of The Bell Jar. I haven’t even read The Tin Drum but I think the part about the “inmate of a mental hospital” made me instantly think of Plath. The opening of her book is actually probably one of my favourites:

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

- The Bell Jar

It’s really offbeat, and creates a sense of mental instability, intriguing confusion, and brimming darkness, despite the seemingly warm and sweet season.

Ariel, are we neighbours now? :D

We live on the same street!

I'm still trying to finish Fast Food Nation.